Mt. Cook: A night in shining armour
MEENAKSHI RAO goes stargazing in one of the 11 dark sky reserves in the world at Mt Cook National Park & gets completely star-struck Temperature: Super shivery at 4 degrees. Backdrop: Blue, snowclad mountains on all sides. Job at hand: Tracking down none less than Jupiter, Saturn (with all its rings), the Southern Cross and, well, some butterflies in the sky. All this while you are trying not to get waylaid by a shiny white patch splashed across the twinkling sky, much like an artist’s wanton brushstroke to give his dark canvas its first break of art. That’s the Milky Way, upclose, upfront and breathtaking. As a workplace, it couldn’t have gotten groovier than this. At Mt Cook, Sir Edmund Hillary’s playground before he got the Everest bug, there are many things you can do, including merely gazing awestruck at the sky-kissing peaks from your unrestricted room window of the Hermitage Hotel, the only heritage property in the heart of the Aoraki/Mt Cook National Park...